Comment on Average utilitarianism must be correct?

Sat, 01 Feb 2014 13:33:29 GMT

From the outside you say that a world with 10 people suffering LOTS is better than a world where (10 people suffer LOTS and 90 people suffer slightly less).

But given a choice, you'll choose to one of the people in the second world rather than one of the people in the first world. So what exactly is the first world "better" at? Better at not horrifying you when viewed from the outside, not better at not hurting you when experienced from the inside.

No, you are conflating two distinct questions here: the question of whether a world is better "from the inside" versus "from the outside", and the question of which world you would pick, if you knew the welfare levels of every person in either world, but ignored the identities of these people. Concerning the first question, which is the question relevant to our original discussion, it is clear that the world with the surplus of agony cannot be better, regardless of whether or not you believe that things can be better only if they are better for someone (i.e. better "from the inside").

I don't care what every contemporary moral philosopher says. If someone can't decide what something is supposed to be better at, then they have no business using the word 'better' in the first place.

I was trying to get you understand that it is probably unwise to assume that people much smarter than you, who have thought about the issue for much longer than you have, have somehow failed to notice a distinction (impersonally better versus better for someone) that strikes you as glaringly obvious. And, as a matter of fact, these people haven't failed to notice that distinction, as anyone with a passing knowledge of the literature will readily attest.

Here's a simple scenario that should persuade you that things are not nearly as simple as you seem to believe they are. (This case was first introduced by Derek Parfit, and has been discussed extensively by population ethicists.) Suppose a woman who desires to have children is told by a competent doctor that, if she conceives a child within the next month, the child will very likely be born with a major disability. However, if the mother waits and conceives the child after this critical period, the baby's chances of being born with that disability are close to zero. Most reasonable people will agree that the mother should wait, or at least that she has a strong reason to wait. But why should she? If the mother doesn't wait and has a disabled child, this child couldn't say, "Mother, you wronged me. If you had waited, I wouldn't have been born with this disability." If the mother had waited, a different child would have been born. So if we want to insist that the mother does have a reason for waiting, we must drop, or at least revise, the principle that things can be better only if they are better for someone.

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